Asus overclocks Core i7 to 5.4GHz

Posted at: 5:31pm 18th November 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

The R&D guys at Asus show the potential of Intel’s new architecture when using liquid nitrogen cooling

We have to admit that we were pretty chuffed after getting a Core i7 to run at 4.27GHz using just air cooling, but the research and development (R&D) guys at Asus have just shown us what the chip can do if you cool it with LN₂, with which they managed to achieve an incredible clock speed of 5.4GHz.

Using a 3.2GHz Core i7 965 Engineering Sample, Asus achieved the overclock using its own X58-based P6T Deluxe motherboard, along with 3GB of OCZ triple-channel RAM. However, the real star of the show appears to be the CPU itself, as the overclock was achieved with a huge 27x multiplier and a 200MHz QPI base clock. While this is a decent enough overclock over the 133MHz default, we overclocked the QPI to 210MHz on the P6T Deluxe in our own tests, and we even managed to get 220MHz out of the Asus Rampage II Extreme (reviewed in Issue 65 of Custom PC), so this isn’t an exceptional achievement for the motherboard.

On a side note, we’re also slightly confused about the 3,600MHz Rated FSB reported in the CPU-Z screenshot (see below), but we assume that this is a quirk of using the current version of CPU-Z on new technology.

While we’re pretty sure that this overclock wouldn’t be stable enough to run through our benchmarks, it’s still a great achievement for an overclock, and just goes to show the potential of the Core i7 architecture for achieving sky-high clock speeds with the right equipment, so hats off to the chaps at Asus.

Have you bought yourself a new Core i7 setup yet and, if so, have you tried overclocking it? Let us know in the comments section below.